So now we have a proposed executive order to ensure that federal contracting companies have to declare their political contributions. Predictably those presumably making the largest contributions (at present the legal situation is that companies have been granted the right, by the Supreme Court, to make unlimited donations without any disclosure at all, so we have no information to work with) have come out against this.

The US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable oppose the new law because, they say, it would "bring politics into what is supposed to be a non-partisan federal contracting process." I really do love it when vested interests are so obvious that they can muster only a feeble defense against opponents. Quite how the disclosure of political contributions is suppose to render a process more partisan is beyond me. Of course if you spent millions trying to influence the outcome of the last election in your favor then you might not want your customers or the public to know that. At present there are no records of who contributed to the $33 million fund used by the Chamber of Commerce, but I think we can assume that few of them are likely to be strong advocates for the consumer.

America is increasingly a country where the rich are supported by the government in their shamefully greedy plans to disenfranchise the poor even further. Sure, there are always going to be inequalities in income, but the gap between the richest and the poorest is widening faster in America than in most other countries (and after adjusting for inflation working-class people actually earn less today than they did twenty years ago). Unfortunately an anemic media is part of the problem (being run by big business they aren't generally supportive of moves agains business interests) rather than offering any kind of a solution, so at the moment the turkeys continue to vote for Christmas. Business interests seem confident that people will continue to bear it as the financial pips are squeezed even harder, but eventually the worm must turn and people will say "enough".

Let's just hope they don't say it the same way the French did at the time of their revolution. People will say that revolutions just don't happen nowadays, but that would be ignoring the recent evidence of the Middle East. And yet those whose comfortable lives will be most disrupted by any kind of revolution (and these people don't even like technological revolutions, because of the inward investment they require) continue to make things worse for those whose work actually keeps the money going round and the wealth accumulating. Myopia of such staggering proportions surely carried with it a hubris that will be the downfall of the oppressors.

What I don't understand is why those who are so busy enriching themselves at other people's expense, and who already have more money than they can spend in a hundred lifetimes, seem to have no concept of "enough". Looked at one way, business is simply an environment that allows people to collectively do things that individually would be unethical and illegal. The whole legal nonsense of "corporate personhood" is completely bogus and should be redacted from all legislation at the first opportunity. It allows shareholders and management to wash their hands, hold them up and say "Hey, it was just business". Which seems to be BPs answer to all the questions about why they have by far the worst safety record of any oil-producing company. If BP really were a person I would cheerfully vote for the death sentence - sorry, stockholders, you lose: your company was being run carelessly and unethically, so it has died and gone to heaven, and the courts decreed that you only get back 30% of your investment.

Now that would be capitalism I could live with. Of course the capitalists will cry "foul" as soon as they see any such proposal, because despite all the nonsense about capital "taking risks" capitalists don't in fact like risk at all, and work in every way they can (including successfully lobbying for the right to inject unlimited amounts of money into the political debate anonymously) to avoid it. Yet the justification for the profits is that if there weren't profits then capital would go to something else less risky.

American politics is a dirty game, played by people who in many cases have little interest in the electorate who voted for their representation. Congress is nakedly supportive of selfish legislation to enrich their corporate backers, and education appears to be so badly hosed that the majority of kids emerging from school are hardly capable of enough joined-up thinking to say why the present state of affairs is undesirable.

This really isn't the advanced society that America likes to project an image of to the public world. It's been said that war is the the continuation of politics by other means. It seems that at present politics is the continuation of corruption by other means. Corporations nowadays like to force governments (national, regional and local, depending on the size of the project) to bribe them with tax breaks as incentives to generate new business or build new plants (Walmart being the prime example, where city governments actually incentivize Walmart to come in and put their established small retailers out of business, but other examples are not hard to find nowadays). It's time that the governments learn that the companies accepting these incentives are only there for as long as the incentive lasts, and they will disappear the minute it's more advantageous to the bottom line to find a new teat to suckle.